‘Black Mirror’ Recovers Its Dark Stride With Compulsively Watchable Seventh Season of Tech Nightmares

Alci Rengifo

Charlie Brooker’s “Black Mirror” has never really been about our current fears regarding the machines taking over. The true effect of this series is in the realization that new technologies won’t change human nature but feed into it. Give a person the power to create digital clones and they will surely lord over them like tyrants. Jealousy will be even harder to control and bad memories can linger even longer, immortalized in new ways through virtual reality. This seventh season of the show touches on such subject matter without getting shallow or swallowed by all the sci-fi. It’s a welcome return to form for the series, after Brooker seemed to struggle with finding fresh ideas in the last two uneven offerings. 

Six new stories imagine various scenarios that are futuristic in the literal sense, but ring more than true for how we live already. Longtime fans might be tempted to skip over to the final episode, which is a sequel (Brooker’s first ever) to one of the show’s best-known nightmares. The season begins with “Common People,” where a working class couple, Mike (Chris O’Dowd) and Amanda (Rashida Jones), are trying to have a child when Amanda is diagnosed with a brain tumor. To save her, Mike agrees to a procedure that saves her consciousness into the cloud. Oh, but like your phone or streaming services, Amanda’s consciousness can only function within “the zone of coverage.” If you want broader coverage, or avoiding your partner suddenly spouting ads, there is a higher package that is more expensive. It’s a diabolical fable where Brooker isn’t mocking the characters, which generates much empathy. The real target is the corporate abuse of potential life-saving discoveries, turning them into commodities and forcing the poor to pay their lives away. Tracee Ellis Ross is stoic toxicity as a corporate representative who keeps coldly recommending the couple simply upgrade.

The rise of A.I. and other technologies will surely continue altering our perceptions of reality. Brooker, who writes every episode, explores in microcosmic and grand fashion the twisting of truth in “Bête Noire” and “Hotel Reveries.” In the first story, a corporate tech worker Maria (Siena Kelly) is unnerved when a former outsider from high school, Verity (Rosy McEwen), joins the staff. Suddenly, everything starts to go wrong for Maria in ways she can’t explain or at least in a way where anyone would believe her. Surely Verity is behind it all, possibly as a savage revenge of the girl who can’t over the past. A common strength in Brooker’s writing is the way the personal becomes so well meshed with technology in these stories. In “Hotel Reveries,” a movie star named Brandy (Issa Rae) gets cast in a remake of her favorite 1940s melodrama. The futuristic catch is that she will be literally placed within the film thanks to a company represented by Kimmy (Awkwafina). As long as she remembers the original dialogue, Brandy just has to recite her lines in place of the original actor. This is a lavishly shot story in homage to classic Hollywood and becomes an emotional journey involving Brandy’s “co-star,” Dorothy (Emma Corrin). The result is one of the series’ most moving episodes since the acclaimed 2016 episode “San Junipero.” It also doubles as an intelligent critique of the industry’s current obsession with endless remakes where nothing classic is sacred anymore.

Brooker also works with co-writers this season and this can help explain the renewed strength of the material after the last few seasons felt like the showrunner might have been on the edge of creative burnout. When he was beginning to resort to werewolf stories, you could sense the fountain was dry. With Ella Road he conjures one of this season’s more elegant entries, “Eulogy,” starring an emotionally wounded Paul Giamatti as Phillip. When he receives news that a past love has died and is asked to provide material for her funeral, Phillip is given the chance to revisit the past by entering old photographs. This then becomes an honest reflection on how we remember the past versus what the truth is. The episode is romantic but with a deeper melancholy. “Black Mirror” tends to focus on how technology will help us build alternate versions of ourselves. “Eulogy” deals with the way painful meditations might be more cathartic or shattering if we’re given the chance to actually go back to a memory. Stunning virtual reality will not change that we can be rash and selfish.

The weakest entry, “Plaything,” begins strongly enough as an eerie look at gamer culture and the idea of “digital life forms” or sentient digital beings inside a system. Peter Capaldi is perfect as a long-haired hermit who has been obsessively “taking care” of a digital community of small characters created in the 1990s. There’s an Easter egg here linked to the famous “choose-your-own-adventure” 2018 episode, “Bandersnatch.” Aside from that and the fascinating first act, the episode doesn’t really go anywhere and the apocalyptic finale feels too abrupt, like half of an unfinished chapter. More satisfying is “USS Callister: Into Infinity,” which is Brooker’s first ever sequel to a past entry. The plot picks up from the Emmy-winning “USS Callister” from season four, a witty homage to “Star Trek” mixed with a dark commentary on workplace abuses of power. You may recall it involved a loner tech genius, Robert Daly (Jesse Plemons), inventor of the “Infinity” video game, who collected DNA from workers at the company he co-founded to then create digital clones to do with as he pleased in a game environment of his favorite TV show, “Star Fleet.” 

In the sequel, which continues the aesthetic nods at J.J. Abrams’ take on “Star Trek” (even the title feels like a wink at 2013’s “Star Trek: Into Darkness”), the digital crew of the USS Callister, led by Nanette Cole (Cristin Milioti), are now zooming through the digital gaming cosmos. They steal in-game credits from other players to stay alive, since the countless real world people playing in the game system can simply exit while their deaths would literally mean the end. For most of its 1 hour and 30 minute runtime, the episode is a darkly funny romp that gradually gets deeper and darker as the crew feels the clock ticking, other gamers come gunning for them and they attempt to make contact with the real world Nanette. Just when it feels it’s going to be a pure sci-fi action piece, Brooker and writers Bisha K. Ali, William Bridges and Bekka Bowling take the material to surprising places. Not only does the writing touch on the subject of the value of humans even as digital clones, but it finds a smart way to revisit its original theme of misogyny and power. The ending is a fun retread to the kind of surreal conclusion you might find in “The Twilight Zone.”

“Black Mirror” has been around for over a decade now and technology it has speculated about feels either close or just about here. Some episodes, like “Nosedive” or “The Waldo Moment,” don’t even feel like satire anymore, the latter cited as a pop culture prediction of Trump by internet commentators. Season seven proves there is still plenty of inspiration to be found. This series can keep mining for material since technology is only increasing in its encroachment on human life, not retreating. Every new gadget, tool or software, not least the vast shadow of A.I., becomes nothing more than new devices for the best and worst of ourselves. As long as Brooker keeps plugging into how the human mind is more dangerous than any app, this series will not grow out of fashion. It can keep evolving ever so darkly with the rest of us.

“Black Mirror” season seven begins streaming April 10 on Netflix.